The Washington Declaration on Black Women's Labor

I. The Moment

We write at a time of profound national disruption. Across the United States, institutions that once promised stability — government agencies, universities, nonprofits, and corporations — are undergoing rapid restructuring. In the wake of the political and economic upheavals of 2024 and 2025, hundreds of thousands of workers have been displaced as jobs were eliminated, programs dismantled, and long-standing commitments to workforce equity abandoned.

Black women, who have long served as the backbone of the nation's public service, care economy, educational systems, and organizational leadership, have borne a disproportionate share of these losses. The present moment reveals a painful truth: the nation has relied upon Black women's labor while refusing to guarantee the dignity, security, and reciprocity that such labor deserves.

This declaration marks the beginning of a new conversation — on our terms — about the conditions under which Black women will continue to build and sustain American institutions.

II. Historical Context

Black women have participated in the American workforce at rates far exceeding those of other women throughout the nation's history. From the late nineteenth century onward, Black women were compelled to work out of economic necessity, frequently confined to domestic, agricultural, and service labor through deliberate systems of exclusion from wealth-building pathways.

Across the twentieth century, Black women sustained critical sectors — healthcare, education, caregiving, and public service — often without recognition, protection, or fair compensation. In the modern economy, Black women remain among the most economically active groups in the United States, heavily represented in the professions that hold civic and social life together.

The pattern is consistent across generations: Black women stabilize American institutions through their labor, and those institutions have rarely responded with equal protection, opportunity, or security in return.

III. The Great Firings of 2024–2025

In 2024 and 2025, the United States experienced sweeping job losses across federal agencies, nonprofit institutions, educational systems, and corporate sectors. Programs were dismantled. Departments dissolved. Workforce commitments were reversed overnight.

Black women experienced this upheaval with particular and devastating force. Concentrated in public service, education, nonprofit leadership, and organizational culture roles, many found themselves uniquely exposed to layoffs and restructuring. Careers built over decades were abruptly interrupted. Pathways to stability were severed without warning or recourse.

The scale of this disruption demands recognition. Hundreds of thousands of jobs held by Black women disappeared during this period, marking one of the most significant workforce displacements affecting Black women in recent American history.

Black women must be made whole after the Great Firings of 2024–2025.

IV. Structural Failure

The upheaval exposed longstanding weaknesses in the architecture of American labor. Black women are concentrated in sectors that sustain civic life — and are the first to face cuts when institutions contract or reorganize. This is not coincidence. This is design.

Beyond formal roles, Black women routinely perform invisible labor: mentoring colleagues, managing conflict, holding teams together, and sustaining workplace culture. This labor is rarely acknowledged. Never compensated. And consistently abandoned the moment restructuring begins.

The Great Firings revealed a foundational contradiction at the heart of American institutional life: the nation depends on Black women's labor to function, and then refuses to protect the workers who make that function possible. A reckoning with the present crisis requires confronting this structural failure directly and without evasion.

V. The Pillars of the Declaration

VI. The Demand for Restoration

The consequences of the Great Firings require more than acknowledgment. They require repair.

Workforce reductions that disproportionately affected Black women must be reviewed to determine whether labor and civil rights protections were violated. Where wrongful termination occurred, workers must be considered for reinstatement and provided with meaningful compensation for economic harm. Equal Employment Opportunity complaints prematurely dismissed must be reopened and reexamined with full rigor.

Political rhetoric and ideological shifts cannot justify the erosion of workplace protections. No election cycle, no reorganization plan, and no policy reversal erases the obligation to workers whose labor built the institutions now being dismantled around them.

VII. An Invitation to the Nation

This declaration is offered as the beginning of a national conversation, not the end of one. We invite scholars, policymakers, workers, institutional leaders, and members of the public to engage with these ideas, challenge them, strengthen them, and act on them.

The Washington Declaration on Black Women's Labor serves as a living framework for dialogue ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The nation now faces a choice: confront the structural failures exposed by this crisis and build something more equitable, or repeat the patterns that made this crisis inevitable.

We have carried this country for generations. We are not asking for charity. We are demanding accountability. And we are offering this declaration as a foundation for a labor contract with America that finally holds.